From Toronto Life, January 3, 2023:
Before he was the egomaniacal, influential and just plain weird owner of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, he was an awkward kid who built computers and chased girls at Queen’s University.
THE ONTARIO YEARS OF THE WORLD’S MOST ABSURD BILLIONAIRE
Few people draw as much attention to themselves as Elon Musk.In some ways, he can’t help it. When a person is worth about $150 billion—making him, at age 51, one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet—people are bound to be curious. But Musk is also the type of guy who wants you to look. The type of guy who, in April 2022, struck a $44-billion deal to buy Twitter, bragged that he did it so he could “help humanity,” then spent the summer very publicly trying to get out of paying up. The type of guy who, two days before finally closing the headline-making purchase in late October, changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit” and posted a video of himself walking into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink, captioning it, with a resounding comedic thud, “Let that sink in!” And the type of guy who proceeded to ruthlessly jettison half of his inherited staff, ominously warning everyone else to work harder (something he calls “being hardcore”). Musk is so odd, so ambitious and so mercurial that it’s easy to forget he’s also brilliant. Can all of those extremes coexist in one human? Normally, no. But Musk is not normal. He’s earned nearly everything he has by being smart—and by possessing a lifelong, near-maniacal sense of self-belief.
Musk is like an alien doing his best impersonation of a human. Unsurprisingly, he has always been somewhat of an outcast. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother, Maye, was a dietician and model. (She’d go on to become a CoverGirl and appear in a Beyoncé video.) His father, Errol, was an engineer who worked in property development and emerald mining. Musk has said that he was raised first by books—particularly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation sci-fi series—and then by his parents. When he was eight, they divorced. Musk and his younger siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, went to live with Maye. By the time he was 10, he’d started to feel sorry for Errol, who seemed sad and lonely without his family. Musk decided to join his dad in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg. The move turned out to be a terrible mistake. Musk has since described his father as someone who “will plan evil.” Errol, in his defence, has said he’s been accused of many things, among them being a “rat” and a “shit,” but stresses that he loves his kids. (Musk once tried to mend things with his father as an adult, but it didn’t go well. He has since severed their relationship.)
School was hardly a respite. Musk was mercilessly bullied as a teen. While his nerdy exploits hinted at his nascent talent—by age 12, he’d sold a space-themed PC game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500—they weren’t exactly cool. Plus, he was small, the youngest in his class, and he struggled to fit into the school’s macho culture. Gangs of kids hunted him through the hallways, intent on pummelling him. Once, a group of brawny boys threw him down a set of stairs, resulting in a trip to the hospital and a week out of school. The constant harassment didn’t ease until Musk turned 16, hit six feet and began learning karate, judo and wrestling. After puberty, he got into a fight with the biggest bully in his school and, at least in Musk’s telling, knocked him out with a single punch. It taught him a lesson: never try to appease a bully; it’s better to slug them in the nose. (The irony, of course, is that these days Musk is the bully.)
At 17, he fantasized about escaping apartheid-era South Africa, moving overseas and chasing the American dream. Canada was the closest he could get, at least initially. Maye was born in Regina, and branches of her family remained scattered across the country. Musk’s plans hinged on staying with a great-uncle in Montreal—a man who, he discovered upon landing at the Montreal airport in June 1988, had since moved to Minnesota. Unbothered, Musk bought a cross-Canada hop-on, hop-off bus ticket for $100. He travelled over to Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and hitched a ride to his second cousin’s house, where he got to work shovelling out grain bins at a nearby farm. When that got old, he moved on to splitting logs in Vancouver and then cleaning a lumber mill boiler room for $18 an hour. But hard labour wasn’t what Musk envisioned for his future.
Two years later, in the summer of 1990, he landed a sales internship at Microsoft Canada, travelling around southern Ontario and meeting with potential clients. It was a slog, but Musk found the challenge invigorating. His boss, David Carter, expected the 19-year-old to be intimidated, at least at first, but he was fearless, excitable and wildly enthusiastic. Carter remembers him returning to the office at the end of each week carrying a stack of leads ripped out of the Yellow Pages. He’d circle every company he met with and scrawl his observations next to each. To break the ice with dealers, he’d do card tricks. He’d talk about any new technology to anyone who would listen. In the burgeoning tech world, Musk saw boundless opportunity. He’d tell his boss, You could do it that way, or you could build this new thing. Officially, Musk was just an intern, but he didn’t act like one. As Carter put it to me, “He didn’t shy away from having an opinion.”
Come fall, Musk was ready to start university. He debated studying either physics and engineering at the University of Waterloo or business and commerce at Queen’s University. After visiting both campuses, he chose Queen’s—not because of the academics but because it had more girls, and Musk didn’t want to spend his college time with, as he would later put it, “a bunch of dudes.” His next years in Kingston would prove to be formative. There, Musk met his first wife, Justine Wilson, his best bud, Navaid Farooq, and the fellow computer programmers who would go on to help him build his early companies. It was also where he contemplated the big ideas that would eventually turn him into the tech industry’s most controversial rock star: electric vehicles, solar energy, space travel and galactic colonization. By the time he finished his post-secondary studies, Musk had decided that he could do whatever he wanted. Make a fortune. Become famous. Shape the world....
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